Slade’s much-loved Christmas hit Merry Xmas Everybody celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, and PRS for Music is now able to reveal the enduring song’s impressive global reach.
Written by Noddy Holder and Jim Lea, Merry Xmas Everybody was originally released in November 1973 and first reached the top of the UK singles chart the following month.
Speaking to PRS for Music’s M Magazine back in 2011 about penning the Christmas hit, Noddy recalled: ‘We cut [Merry Xmas Everybody] in the US at the end of the hot summer of 1973. The studio was in an office block and we sang the chorus in the stairwell next to the studio to get that echoey effect. Four English blokes singing about Christmas… the office workers must have thought we were mad!
‘Then we took it back to England and played it to Polydor, and they flipped. It went straight to number one and sold one million copies in the first week. It was up to that point the fastest-selling single ever in the UK. We knew we had a big hit when we wrote it, but for it to be still going strong so many years later… well, we never imagined.’
Half a century on, new data from PRS has uncovered the track’s true international appeal. It can now be revealed that Merry Xmas Everybody has been played in 139 countries around the world.
While the song enjoys its biggest popularity in the UK, music fans in the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark are among its biggest admirers elsewhere. PRS’s data also shows that Merry Xmas Everybody has been streamed, downloaded, broadcast and performed in countries such as The Bahamas, Peru and Djibouti.
PRS has compiled a chart of the countries that have had the most streams, downloads, broadcasts and public performances of Merry Xmas Everybody, which you can see below.
- United Kingdom
- Netherlands
- Germany
- Denmark
- United States
- Sweden
- Finland
- Belgium
- Canada
- Norway
- Ireland
- Australia
- Japan
- Austria
- France
- Switzerland
- Italy
- Ireland
- Poland
- Spain
The 2022 Christmas period saw Merry Xmas Everybody receive over 3,376,507 seconds — or 5.5 continuous weeks — of UK radio airtime. The song was particularly popular across the airwaves in Lincolnshire, Leicester, Stoke and Cornwall.
Merry Xmas Everybody has been covered numerous times over the years, including renditions by the likes of Oasis, Robbie Williams and Girls Aloud.
